


Brothers

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (That was a Replicant joke), Clone Angst, Clones, Comrades in Arms, Do Clones Dream of Clone Sheep?, Family Angst, Fix-It, Gen, Han Solo Lives, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-20 22:36:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6027919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren knows he is not Ben Solo. He doesn’t know that he’s <em>never been</em> Ben Solo. </p><p>(That “there can be only two” is the rule everyone knows. But <em>they</em> ought to know better, because who is more likely to cheat than a Sith Master that has survived their own Master? Snoke keeps back-up plans, and one of them is that <em>his apprentice comes with an expiration date</em>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brothers

**Author's Note:**

> (This is a wish fulfillment fic that cuts down on the fatalities and planet-splosions. It leaves the fault for the most of the casualties at Snoke’s door. Ben Solo, heaving his way though (a frequently sulky and nightmare-ridden) adolescence fails the stranger danger test. He doesn’t kill his classmates, but he falls heavily under the influence of an older, more experienced Force user both before and after, and he witnesses (and Force feels) many of their deaths, contributing to his initial vulnerability to further conditioning. The survivors are hurried away to be hidden and it is not until years later that anyone hears anything of “Kylo Ren” of the Knights of Ren.)

When Ben Solo is fourteen, he falls into a nightmare from which he cannot wake. (His family falls into a nightmare as well, new temple newly scattered among trusted allies and grieving families, parents and uncles heartbroken, but _they_ wake up each day cycle to do what they can and their lost (taken) child never does, not for a long, _long_ time.)

When Kylo Ren is twenty (five) his master introduces him to the First Order.

Kylo Ren is not Ben Solo. He denies being Ben Solo, even in the privacy of his own mind, because he is no longer Ben Solo. (He has never been Ben Solo. (And he has very little privacy in his mind, which is not (and never has been) entirely his own.))

*

Ben Solo has been a prisoner for longer than he was free child growing in the grip of his family’s love and his own nightmares. Ben Solo dreams and kills in his dreams, and never (seldom) wakes.

Kylo Ren is a murderer. (Kylo Ren is a child soldier.) The Resistance put a price on his head.

Its General puts another there.

Leia does not know from what desperately needed project she will withdraw her personal funds to pay this ransom, but she cannot surrender the last hope of her child.

The Resistance will pay well for his death. Leia Amidala Organa Solo will pay five times that for his living body (and would mortgage her own soul if it costs more).

She does not blame her brother. She does not blame her husband. Ben is (was) as tender-hearted as Luke (as Breha and Beru and Shmi). Kylo Ren is a hard-hearted as his mother, (as hard-hearted as Anakin-in-the-temple-among-the-children-oh-gods-protect-us-all).

She misses her brother. She misses her husband. ( _Oh, Han, it was not your fault, but mine, come **home**.)_ But they are adults, have been adults, and one cannot champion freedom without accepting, truly believing, in free will. But Ben was so young. So young, and Force users are vulnerable to things other children are not. He is older now than she was when a Sith held her in his power and tortured her, unknowing of their connection, their _happenstance_ (was Vader unknowing? (what does it feel like to live in Darkness?)) but some part of her can only feel the desperate embrace of his ten year old arms as she sent him away to find control.

 _Gods_. What ten year old needs to learn self-control? So he hated to sleep alone or in a dark room. So he popped lights and tapped shoulders from afar and demanded stories and always, always her attention, but most of all her constant presence _‘to keep the ghosts away, Mama’_.

She can hear his voice sometimes, and it is only a memory, another ghost to join the billions of Alderaanians whose presence she still feels, if fainter and fainter each day. _It is only a memory because **it would not sound the same if it was not**_. Her child is a child no longer, voice no doubt long since cracked and dropped, he stalks the galaxy behind a mask whose modulator emulates that of her warped sire. _Nightmares. Her family is made of nightmares and her hands are covered in blood._ ( _Poor Han and poor Padme, to marry into it. Poor Luke, that he cannot escape it. She is Vader’s daughter as surely as Bail’s, and Here There Be Monsters.)_

The ghosts of her own parents must have turned from her in shame when she told her child that ten was much bigger than nine or eight or seven and that he couldn’t come to her meetings cradled over her hip or pressed against her side, but that he would be too busy with Uncle Luke to miss her more than a little.

(Leia at seven or eight or ten was fearless, loved long hikes into the wilderness, fast speeder bikes, a good argument. But Ben was never just like her any more than he was just like Han, and Leia, who had wanted to be brave and kind as her father Bail, never really noticed that her mother worried just as much about the speeder bikes as the blaster practice on pacifistic Alderaan. And maybe if either had lived, or if Padme had, fierce and beautiful and flawed in her love, that alien queen and senator that was her blood if not her knowing, they would have understood Ben, could have bridged that gap.)

She had honestly thought that she was speaking the truth, certain that somehow she was just making this, this, _separation anxiety_ worse if she did not put the best face upon it. She had carried her baby aboard Han’s latest ship herself, tucking him into a seat, prying his hands from her clothes, her wrists, her hair. He had been terrified, heaving great gasps of air, hands scrabbling, and she finally had unbuckled him, cradled him, and used one of the little Force tricks Luke taught her, just a hum, a resonance in the air, in the Force, between their bodies, chest to tiny side.

Ben had fallen asleep, cheeks red and tear-streaked, breathing congested. In the sudden silence, the ship had seemed to resonate with his last howls and she had handed him to Han, ready to cry herself.

She had known then, as she always suspected, known that she was a bad mother. Ben needed objectivity, rationality, he needed a male role model to show him the Force, something beyond meditation or _Listening_ , the veil of _notice-me-not_ , or _I-intend-no-harm_ , the few little tricks she knew.

Luke had agreed that Ben needed more structured training than she could provide. If Ben took readily to logic, to historical negotiations and galactic history, well, he was an intelligent child, but he was also a Force user, more powerful than her own talents, and they could not risk him developing bad habits.

Doubtless this is why the Jedi only took infants. She had intended only to love him and give him whatever she could. _This is cruel, she cannot bear it, she will break of it, is breaking of it. But like everything else in her life, she does it anyhow._

Leia would give her life if she could only have Ben back. _But her life is not her own_.

(And anyhow it wouldn’t purchase her what she longs for… a second chance.)

She’s been working for the Resistance since before she ever reached the age of majority to vote (not that it mattered in the Empire’s senate). She’s withstood torture, and condescension, and catty gossip at overlong banquets full of people she would have cheerfully strangled.

(Something Leia will never admit is that she is grateful that by the time anyone thought (anyone could) teach her to touch the Force as more than feelings, she was mature enough not to actually carry out this most Vader of impulses. And gods, oh gods, she never wanted to pity that monster, even if he saved Luke, even if Luke loves him still, but now, as a mother if not a daughter, she understands. Surely there must be something, _someone_ worth saving in Kylo Ren. She has lost almost everything else.)

She’s watched her planet die. She _felt_ her people consumed. She is hard, but there are some things in her that are still vulnerable. Han wanted more children (she wanted more children), but it was never the right time, not with Ben so emotionally dependent upon her, with her inability to convince the confrontation-adverse New Republic to do more than undermine its enemies.  Now she feels the part of her that longed for personal things, for a life outside her public persona, and she despises her weakness even as she feeds it. Han and she, they fell apart after, and into habits, the separate orbits of purpose that could try to fill the spaces.

It is not fair.

(Nothing ever has been.)

When Shmi Skywalker walked into the storm, ages ago, and walked out cradling life in her core, she was still a slave and could not run. When the Jedi freed her son, they should have remembered.

Tatooine burns during the day, but it freezes at night, and it can strip the flesh from your bones in a myriad of grains of teeth. The desert is huge, and fierce, and wild. It is hungry and so, so _lonely_. It is not enough to be strong, to be righteous, to be Light. One must cradle the storm within one’s being, lonely child that it is. Serenity _and_ compassion. _Everything_ is a choice.

*

Ben has been a prisoner for more than half his life. His body is thin, delicate despite the physical manipulation protocols of the medical droids drugging him, caring for him, stowing him away like some sort of living library acquisition, kept just in case some future borrower needs more DNA.

They keep the lights off, excepting the minimum topical radiation requirement, they cover the acquisition in a dust sheet in a room too sterile for dust. Every breath is measured, every heartbeat, brainwave, input or output. He is moved so regularly that bedsores never develop, but even deeply under he can feel the bone deep ache of it and he fights as well as he can.  

His bones grow almost as long as his inheritance grants him, but their strength is corrupted by the years of bedrest, the drugs, the lack of true sleep. His mind is in no better a state.

*

The bristles of his shaven head are growing out, but it does little to conceal how close that candle nearly guttered behind the candlewax of his face.

*

Kylo Ren is 29 (according to records) when he is captured (without resistance) by the Resistance, an intimidating figure before the temple of his master, a dark form who raises his hands and halts every blaster bolt, TIE fighter, and X-wing in a battlefield of thousands when he sights the general of the resistance. (It is foolish, but she has taken the field, and if she is beloved for it, she knows in her heart the selfishness of both the action and reason.)

A hush falls among First Order and Resistance alike, the battlefield lit only by the sullen dregs of sunlight through rain and the frozen bolts. Kylo Ren clenches his (their) fists and the light converges, he (they) hold a small sun within his (their) power, he (they) hold the combined might of this final confrontation and he (they) turn toward Leia Amidala Organa Solo, unmasked face like stone cracked along fault lines.

His (their) master laughs (is still laughing) when the apprentice emulates Darth Vader, one final time.

*

The ships, engines off, batteries drained, set down so slowly in the quiet that not a single survivor is crushed. In the quiet, there is even time for the bodies to be retrieved.

*

Kylo Ren has been alive for fourteen years that he can remember (and that’s all that there is _to_ remember (and when he found out, he didn’t rage, not even a little, he was just so, so _empty. (And in the emptiness was another voice, angry and tired, brave and afraid, and he had thought he had finally passed over the horizon and into the madness that had stalked him from earliest memory, but it was not the Light. It was **Not-Alone**. _

_(It was Ben, Ben who had convinced him to play a dangerous game of delays at the Starkiller base, on the_ Finalizer _, happenstance here and there on his errands, his (their) blade cuts connections, resources, vital personnel, destroys this and that. It is never really a decision, just a game. How long until Snoke realizes? How long until he punishes him? If no one ever sees the awful might of the Starkiller base in full flowering, if calibration delays doom the weapon to an early destruction, well, no one could ever really know if it would have destroyed the Hosnian system. It was just an exercise, just practice, not a test, nothing for Snoke to worry out of Kylo’s mind. It was Ben who urged it, but neither of them remember who proposed it first, this game of **What If?**._ )))).

He doesn’t have much longer, even if he isn’t executed for the crimes he’s committed. (Even if it could be argued that, like the Stormtroopers, he was a victim of his own environment, of extensive brainwashing and conditioning from ~~birth~~ decanting. The First Order disdains the use of clones. Except him, and what about him is not to invoke _disdain_?)

Kylo Ren has lived fourteen years, if servitude may be counted in the same linear rates as that of a freeman. He is born of no woman or man, but of transparisteel and pipettes and hatred and eternal struggle.

He is tired and he makes a choice, _takes_ a choice, the first (second (third (fourth)) important one, ever, the first that was not offered, two or more options all engineered by his master. He cannot be salvaged, the struts and welds of him are ancient ( _cheaply made_ he thinks and if it is bitter _they are his own now_ ), but he has one treasure, one refuge, one place where he can remember _not-alone_. His brother might yet live.

_Ben. Starkiller base in the Hosnian system, (full of innocents and criminals and people that haven’t chosen a side, **don’t have to** ). Han. Freedom. _

_It was a string, one leading to another, if Ben could name him a brother, he could be a person, he could recognize that he was surrounded by people and wonder at their lives. If he was worthy of Ben, how much more worthy were others to live, to… love, and to protect what they cherished? How intricate the mysteries of interactions, families, lovers, personal enemies made from personal affronts…_

_Kylo had never touched another for the pleasure of it and none had taken pleasure at his touch. He had been an instrument of torture, a tool of punishment, a phantom of authority with none of his own. He would have traced out the rest of his functioning span, constrained and blinded, enraged… except for Ben._

_On the bridge, suspended, Solo offers him **everything** … and Ben deserves it. Solo doesn’t know Kylo isn’t his son, but Kylo sees in this familiar stranger, (solid self and false memories and Ben’s memories all in conflict) one who… might take on his duties to Ben. _

_He knows that the seconds are ticking down, not just to the bombs, but to his own heartbeat. Here is a leviathan of steel and waiting death and they will both, aged meat that they are, outlive it, so long as they escape in time._

_Solo reaches out, and Kylo reaches back, uncertain if the silence in his mind is emptiness or only that Ben cannot find words. Or perhaps Ben’s heartbeat has exceeded parameters and the droids have increased his dosage in response. His mind is quiet._

_The Force answers his call._

_Solo drops, and Kylo catches him before he can fall._

_He lays Ben’s father down in the corridor, feels the man’s companions running to him. He ducks down another corridor, the Force remembers the plans, or he does, years of careful sabotage and research in the service of it, all soon to be vanished._

_The base is doomed but the evacuation incomplete, and he promised Ben to do what he could to minimize casualties. He calls anger to his hands and breathes it like fire. He has been a biddable if slow student and soon he (they) will need every art he (they?) can summon to convince his master to let him (them) try to make amends, **just one more time**. _

(And the Sith should have remembered too. Strength through passion. _Everything_ is a choice.)

*

Ben is twenty-nine, and Ren looks older, much older; stills taken from mere weeks apart show aging. He is muscled and scarred where Ben Solo is thin and struggling, a boy in the body of a very sick man. (They are both, in their own ways, both.)

The drug and Force protocols that can race a clone to a useful age, the manipulations of mind and matter that can _force_ learning, memories (false)…

They have inertia, cannot be stopped, are running away to an inevitable end.

There is only so much that _can_ be done.

There are few who _could_ do it, Force users winnowed by so many threshings.

There are few who _would_ do it.

(But Luke has nightmares too, and Rey can separate _I do not choose to forgive_ from _inflict_.  And this is a lesson the Jedi should have taught: _Cruelty is never just_. (Even when it is just turning your face away. (Shmi Skywalker never turned her face away. **_Not_** _**once**_.)))

*

Ben woke sometimes, almost. The nightmares were constant, from before his capture, but they varied in subject. (Some of them weren’t even sent by Snoke.) Sometimes he saw through the knight of Ren’s eyes. Sometimes the knight saw through his, or would have, if he wasn’t locked in nightmares, eyes shut, in a room without light. When Ben struggles toward the surface, Kylo can feel it, can feel something desperate to escape, something starving for hope and already deadened, dying. He slashes out, with words, with fists, with the Force. He kills sometimes (often (always)), and wakes (never). He is divided and it hurts.

*

They are brothers, of a sort. They are twins. They are mirrors when they cannot bear to look at themselves, but might yet comfort another. If it were asked.

Until Han, until their penultimate successful deception, no one had ever touched Kylo with gentleness. The co-conspirators had dwelt inside one another’s skins but never laid eyes upon each other.

Kylo’s face burns and freezes with the cold. He confronted _The Girl_ , no longer trapped in a First Order cell, another Force user, an unexpected variable. As the planet shook apart under the unexpected (carefully planned (hoped for)) stresses of Starkiller Base, he took (was given) a mark across his face, the barest kiss of a lightsaber. He marked her back (first?), both necessary, as were the following blows to his shoulder and chest, or so he tells himself, mind quiet _(where is Ben?)_ , (he needs to be convincing and it is better to argue without words) _._ There are no other knights to witness, but he must be careful in his (their) disobediences, for some (most) things he cannot hide when his Master demands it.

His face burns and freezes with wind, snow, and pain, but there is another burning and freezing where Ben’s father touched him, his hands, his cheek. He wonders if his own hands feel like that, could feel like that. The roughness of the man’s skin made it more real, the myriad of tiny tactile details, skin, ligaments, muscle, fat, bone, the age-thickened joints, the grasp, the aliveness of it, the will behind the action. (Even The Girl’s mind strike was not so real.)

The moment hangs in Kylo’s mind like a bell resonating. It shakes his foundations and now, of all times, he wishes he were real (and cannot afford the distraction).

*  
Ben is rising now, the nightmare is not over, but he has surfaced, is surfacing, is swimming toward… something. He is tired, and his mind is fogged, and everything hurts, mind to eyes to bones. The lights are always too bright and the dark is always hunting. He closes his eyes and reaches…

Kylo is falling now, sliding down a slope to the inevitable entropy of every mortal form. Each day cycle it is harder to rise from sleep, a harsh weakness to accept for one who has never slept much, but if he has never been who he thought he was, he can at least own this.

He forces himself up, he forces himself to move, he forces himself to speak and to listen, to teach what he knows, stripped of malice, stripped to the bones of the shared kinship that is only the Force.

He tries to hold still, not to resist, when Rey, in transit between bases and trainings and recruitment of those who can feel the Force, puts her hands to his temples and tries to tidy up the tiny lesions in his brain, the little gnawings at his telomeres. When she finishes each time, he feels more alive, and more tired, and just a little hopeful.

There is irony in Kylo Ren teaching Force healing to the new light of the Resistance. It is something kinder than irony that she should choose to practice so much on him.

He falls asleep more often as time passes, and he reaches…

*

Ben has now lived longer free than a prisoner, so long as one counts both the before and after, but he still lives imprisoned by what happened. He is imprisoned too by guilt. It was not his hands that killed among his classmates. It was not his hands that killed among the Stormtroopers, the Resistance. But emotion heightens Force empathy and for years, every time he almost woke, Kylo Ren felt his anger and despair and desperate struggle for their lost home… and they raised their hands.

Ben lets his hair grow, first past prickling, then far enough to cover over his scalp, the insidious little scars where the oldest drug ports were first placed in his earliest conditioning, when Snoke was still considering two Solo apprentices, before scrapping the plan for one raised without _outside influences_.

His hair grows past his ears, and then his chin, and Han (his father, never Kylo Ren’s, Kylo never had parents, Kylo was a monster, Kylo was raised to be a monster and monsters eat their kin (poor Kylo, one among hundreds of thousands, at least the Stormtroopers had one another and did not have the attentions of the Master upon them)), Han makes a few jokes about it, because Han has never resisted poking things that shouldn’t be poked. Ben is grateful (Kylo is grateful) because he is sick of being the invalid, the timid ex-prisoner. (They are tired of being watched with pity. (Kylo can only swallow so much hate before he chokes.))

Kylo is never alone, not unsecured, but they let him be alone with Ben as if he could not snap his neck, crush his trachea, pull his frail bones from his frail body, halt the flow of his blood, condemn him for what Kylo has never had (denied wanting (was not allowed)).

Ben is able to cross the room now and if Kylo supports him the first few (hundred) times, there are no (present) witnesses.

Ben is able to cross the base now, and if Kylo must be under guard, well, it is more of an honor guard (ready hands and nursemaids) for Ben, just in case.

Ben lets his hair grow until they are, not identical, (they can never be identical, whatever their genetics, not with Ben’s body, grown to adulthood in a box, and Kylo’s body, scarred and descending into the chaos of accelerated age), but matched, somehow.

Kylo’s hair is streaking now, gray, not silver, and for the first time it is Ben that looks the healthy one. In the silence, under the silence, they tell one another things no one else should understand. (Some things are Force carried. Others need never be articulated in any form when they were so long two minds in one body.) Ben pushes himself to learn the Force, and, if he cannot halt the advancing tide, he can at least avert the pain.

And to match a father’s first mistaken touch, Kylo learns what a mother’s embrace feels like, and if General Organa is not his mother, she treads on no one’s territory and at least it pleases Ben.

Time rushes past and Kylo’s body is failing, but his hearing is just fine, and his mind hungry enough to learn Shyriiwook, his tongue still sharp enough to tease Solo with what his first mate divulges.

His sight is going but the Force provides. Leia is _warm-heart-and-cold-bonfire_ , ready to do what is necessary _._  Han is _always-hunting-checks-all-exits-delight-in-the-chase_ and will probably die of it. Master Skywalker is a small star, sad and strong and steady. Chewbacca is a wall of _protection-and-exasperation_ and will outlive them all. Rey is a little bit of all of that and a great deal more of herself.

(He doesn’t remember when _The Girl_ became _Rey_ , but it was sometime after Master Skywalker insisted on endless rounds of group mediation and before General Organa offered him what she had offered Ben.)

Ben is _Home_.

*

There are other presences, of course, but as his horizons contract he finds it difficult to distinguish the living from the never-gone. Both have become more accepting of him than he had thought to hope.

It doesn’t hurt. None of it hurts, and if he is no longer surprised he hopes never to forget how precious it is.

(It hurts, but in a place not held within the collapsing ruins of his body. It hurts in a way that he wants to hold close, and open wide, and surrender to something greater than himself that offers peace. He stretches his arms out, palms up, and feels like he is falling, rising, and embracing everything, all at once.)

*

Ben Solo is thirty-two when his clone (his brother) dies.

He keeps his hair long, but he lets his mother braid it, soothing for them both, a moving meditation that demands nothing of either. (They would both give everything freely, but cannot bear to fail, not in this.)

(He never lifts another lightsaber, with his own hands, or another’s. But he learns to heal, and to teach what he knows to any that would learn. And he never averts his face from pain, whether or not he can offer more than the witnessing. Not once.)

(In the 48th year after the fall of Supreme Leader Snoke, 44 years past the successful, if not contentious, final merging of the Republic, the Resistance, and the First Order, institutionalized slavery in all its forms is hunted to extinction to the far reaches of the Accord’s galaxy.)

Sometimes, if it’s quiet enough, he thinks he can feel Kylo.

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline if you need it:  
> Ben: 14 – 15 – 20 – 29 – 32  
> Kylo: x – 0 – 5 – 14 – 17  
> Ben, taken at 14, Kylo is “born” when he is 15. Ben is 20 when Kylo is 5 years out of the tank and introduced to the First Order as Kylo Ren. Ben is freed at 29; Kylo is 14 years out of the tank. Kylo is 17 years out of the tank when Ben can no longer put him back together faster than he’s fading.


End file.
